According to social theory at the time, from the late 1800's to well into the Mid-20th Century and later, the tenement was the primary social problem to be corrected. You can see from plans presented earlier that the typical tenement was very small: a 3 room tenement would run about 340 square feet; a 4 room tenement would be about 420 square feet. These are not unusual sizes for Manhattan apartments today, of course, but in the era in question, space used today for one or at most two people was considered (even by the reformers) sufficient for 6. Or more.
Households, of course, were larger then. But cramming so many people into such tiny spaces, without adequate ventilation or plumbing, was a recipe for public health crises, fiery tragedies, and all-too-frequent mayhem. Crime bred and flourished under conditions of overcrowding and poverty, and there was a real fear among the middle and upper classes that the masses would one day rise and put a stop to the frivolous ways of their betters.
The tenement was said to be the breeding ground and the center of all sorts of public health and socio/political problems. It was sincerely believed that correcting the tenement problem would solve many others.
Social reformers like Mabel Hyde Kittredge -- whom I have periodically mocked in these entries -- saw it as their bounden duty to improve the lives of their social inferiors and to raise them up from their state of abject misery. Their notions of what to do were not always wrong, by any means. On the other hand, placing too much blame on the tenement itself and being blind to the other social, economic, and political issues of the day was typical for many reformers of the day.
That focus on housing pretty much by itself led to the creation of many working class housing projects that were intended to improve the lot of the struggling workers and get them out of the miseries inherent in the tenement.
Many of such projects have since been demolished. For many of those who were transferred from the tenement slums to the Projects found themselves in an even worse situation than before. Their living conditions might have been marginally improved, but their social fabric and way of life was often destroyed, with nothing viable to take its place.
"If only they lived more like us," the reformers' thinking went, "they'd be more like us, and thus... less of a threat."
So Mabel Hyde Kittredge established Model Tenements in order to teach the residents how to live more like her own middle class self, give them something to aspire to, and to provide them with a foundation for living "better" regardless of where they found themselves. She recruited girls from the neighborhood -- and charged them fees -- to be students of her tenement housekeeping and other courses, and she opened her Model Tenements to view to anyone who chose to take a look, providing residents, tourists slumming, and other social reformers points to ponder over the intractable Problem of the Tenement.
Bertha Smith wrote "The Gospel of Simplicity as Applied to Tenement Homes" for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine in October, 1905. It detailed the efforts of housing reformers, and particularly Mrs. Hyde Kittredge, in their efforts to provide models and training for the dwellers of New York tenements.
And so, we'll let Bertha H Smith open today's lesson:
Uhhh, "the tyranny of things" is certainly a factor in practically everyone's life, but her assertion that house furnishing has led to more crime than anything else is... surprising. Of course narcotics were legal back then, but still...
Of course the point of this lesson is to convince the immigrant hordes that living simply is better in every respect than living in the tawdry and chaotic manner so many of "those people" did.
The problem, though, is that the "tyranny of things" was hardly as acute for the poor immigrant masses as it was for the middle and upper classes -- like Miss Smith and Mrs Hyde Kittredge. If anyone needed to hear the Gospel of Simplicity it was the members of those classes. But then, I think the Misses S and K knew that. Bertha Smith's article, after all, appeared in "The Craftsman," the monthly magazine of Gustav Stickley, and the veritable Bible of strictly simple middle class living even today. In other posts I have gone into some detail about Craftsman houses and the near religious fervor with which their owners regard them.
To be continued...
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